Our next stop is Hirafu, an even bigger resort complex with half a dozen hotels and sixrteen lifts. A true village nestled between a magnificent volcano and a snow-packed lava dome, Hirafu has sloping streets crowded with ski bums and snowboarders from all over Japan and Australia, giving it an edgier, louder feeling than anywhere we've been so far. As soon as Leslee starts up in the gondola, I descend into the village, a place that reminds me of the North Shore of Oahu, where I lived during a brief surfer girl phase. It has the same provisional ambience, cafés and bars, street vendors and scads of kooky pensione-style operations catering to Westerners—places like Grandpapa, with its Swiss chalet exterior, which offers Japanese rooms, a karaoke bar, onsen tours, shiatsu massages, and sake tastings.

It's almost dark when Leslee appears. The moon is rising over Mount Yotei, a stunning conical volcano in the distance, and the night skiers have arrived. As we walk down to A-Bu-Cha 2, a restaurant specializing in hot pot dishes, dozens of night snowboarders pass us on their way to the lifts. Leslee recounts her day and her various brushes with death, showing me the rumpled, dog-eared trail map that she had to continually check (there are no signs, in any language, marking the runs).

A party atmosphere pervades Hirafu. At dinner we're surrounded on all sides by gregarious Aussies, and afterward on the sidewalk by roving bands of endorphin-high boarders drifting into the village bars. It's hard not to notice the posters all over town with the photograph of a missing Australian lad from Brisbane who apparently drank too much one evening during a snowstorm a couple of weeks before and was never seen again. The police were called in, and sniffer dogs, but an extensive search produced nothing. As an older Brisbane fellow told us at A-Bu-Cha 2: "Come spring, the snow drifts will start to melt and they'll find him." The man turned out to be right. The body was found in mid-April.

After twelve hours in Hirafu, we are only too happy to meet up with a shuttle bus sent by the Hotel Kanronomori, where our quiet room and two freshly made futons are undoubtedly waiting, and the twenty-four-hour onsen as well. By this time, hot spring addiction has set in. Several days later in Hakodate, after trudging around the funky port city, ransacking an old kimono shop, and eating at Lucky Pierrot, a thriving local hamburger franchise jammed with schoolkids, Leslee glides to the communal bath at our ryokan, the ultra-traditional Chikuba Shinyotei, like she's been doing it her whole life. Befriending a dowager granny and her two aging daughters, she floats with them in the soft clear mineral water, all of them pink from the heat and gabbing like teenagers.

There are so many words in Japanese for snow. Watayuki is cotton snow. Kona yuki is powder snow. Neyuki is snow at the foot of a tree. And sasame yuki is a light sprinkling of snow. Out in the rotemburo, it pains me to see how the warm sunshine has caused the snow to dwindle into muddy piles in the formal garden. But there doesn't seem to be a word for that.